Monday, February 1, 2016

Mapping Female Bodily Features of Attractiveness

“Beauty is bought by judgment
of the eye” (Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost), but the bodily features
governing this critical biological choice are still debated. Eye movement
studies have demonstrated that males sample coarse body regions expanding from
the face, the breasts and the midriff, while making female attractiveness
judgements with natural vision. However, the visual system ubiquitously
extracts diagnostic extra-foveal information in natural conditions, thus the
visual information actually used by men is still unknown.

We thus used a
parametric gaze-contingent design while males rated attractiveness of female
front- and back-view bodies. Males used extra-foveal information when
available. Critically, when bodily features were only visible through
restricted apertures, fixations strongly shifted to the hips, to potentially
extract hip-width and curvature, then the breast and face.

Our hierarchical
mapping suggests that the visual system primary uses hip information to compute
the waist-to-hip ratio and the body mass index, the crucial factors in
determining sexual attractiveness and mate selection.